Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Unswerving fidelity to a chimera may look like a good thing, but I suspected it would lead me into trouble. Could such fidelity, by no means a mystical matter, nevertheless possess quasi-religious aspects? It sometimes seemed that only mystical faith, even in this bizarre variant, could lend meaning to life in the socialist tunnel. I could not guess at the time that, one day thirty years later, my turn to leave would come, when I would apply for a passport in honor of old Leopold Bloom.

In the early 1960s, I was busy building apartment blocks in the center of Ploiesti. I suppose the nine-story edifice, the so-called Pergola Block, next to the covered market, is still standing, one of the mitigations for my sin of not having had children or for having written ephemeral books.

The quick pace of Ploieşti came as a shock to the slow-moving Buko-vinan that I was, even after my years in Bucharest as a student. A more senior engineer had warned me to “keep a close eye” on people’s movements at the building site. “You can wake up one morning and find that there are fifty bags of cement missing, or that you’ve signed for twenty loads of concrete more than you actually received, or that you’ve been supplied with only half the amount of brick mentioned in the invoice.” What he hadn’t told me, though, was how I could become a good policeman, when I was not even sure if I was a good engineer.

Before working on the Pergola Block, then the tallest building in the new town center, I had done my apprenticeship with the L-Block, which stood on the opposite side of the market and was only four stories high. As the youngest of the site’s engineers, I had been assigned to the night shift. So, from six in the evening till dawn, I worked not only with the regular construction crew but also with a group of prisoners. The contract with the local penitentiary, regarding the number of workers, the skills required, the working hours and days, and the payment due by the Building Trust, had been signed by the prison’s commanding officer, Major Drăghici, brother of the feared Minister of the Interior and member of the Politbureau.

If, in my early days at the university in 1954, I had practically fainted at my first encounter with the eggplant and the cucumber concoctions in the student canteen, what was I supposed to do at the sight of prisoners and guards? In fact, nothing happened. I did not faint as I saw the prisoners, in their drab uniforms, being brought in by the guards, just as I had not fainted at Periprava in 1958, seeing my father, in his dun-colored prison garb, being watched by guards. I turned pale and speechless, as I had done before, but I did not faint. In any case, contact with the inmates was to be kept to a strict minimum, and I was only allowed to deal, in the guard’s presence, with their foreman, himself a former construction worker. Moreover, the inmates and their guards were restricted to specific areas of the building site. I had asked the boss if there were any political detainees among the prisoners and was assured that the crew contained only “common criminals.” I knew very well, from my own family history, that this designation was as little to be believed as any other in the farcical socialist lexicon.

The inmates were given a chance to reduce their sentences by working outside the prison, and their participation in the building of the town’s new center was more to their benefit than to the Building Trust’s— after all, Ploiesti, even from dusk to dawn, was hardly Periprava. In actual fact, many of the inmates could well have been “common criminals.” Socialist deception did not exclude a measure of truth, however perverted. The work itself was not too demanding, and it was certainly better than being locked up all the time.

For all the assurances meant to calm my apprehensions, I still went to work each evening in a state of anxiety, mindful not only of what I was supposed to sign for — the number of loads of concrete, bags of cement and bricks — but also of the tricks that the prisoners or the guards might be trying to play on me. I was never fully at ease. As soon as evening set in, the women would appear, slinking through the still-wet concrete and the exposed girders. Carrying parcels or bulging envelopes, wide-eyed with impatience, they came to meet their husbands or brothers or lovers and to give them their offerings. The measures taken to bar the women from the building site did not keep them out. One after another, they kept coming, silently, stealthily.

I tried to shut my eyes to the “network” that facilitated these nocturnal trysts. Apparently, I had been studied by the prison contingent, who concluded that I was all right and would keep my silence about these visits. You never knew, however, where the next challenge might come from, where the next trap was being set. I had been approached more than once, outside the gates of the site, or while I was working, by relatives of the inmates or go-betweens, and it was difficult to tell them apart from the agents provocateurs. At dawn, I breathed a sigh of relief. I returned to my shabby room, improvised from a hut, where, on the iron bed, my Juliet lay sleeping.

What had been the point of my Initiation between the ages of five and nine, if, at twenty-five, I was unable to set fire to myself in the public marketplace — like those protesting Buddhist monks in Vietnam — to denounce the Big Lie that encased our lives like the thin shell of an egg? As you touched it, the membrane burst, and you suddenly found yourself alone and helpless, at the mercy of a whip wielded by authority. If in a moment of madness, you shouted out, “The Party has no clothes,” the eggshell would disintegrate in an instant. You were immediately pinned by your arms, like the demented criminal you indeed were, as witnesses stepped forward to confirm your malfeasance. The Big Lie, like a new placenta, prevented us from both dying and being born. One imprudent gesture and the filmy membrane exploded. You had to hold your breath and check yourself constantly, so that your mouth, choked with lies big and small, did not let out, involuntarily, the breath of air that could have shattered the protective cocoon. In fact, we were constantly wrapping the eggshell in other coverings, one inside another, like a nest of Russian dolls. So, what was this blessed Big Lie? An egg-shaped plate of armor? A gift from Mother Nature? The membrane of lies had become, for many, a thick protective coating, dense, indestructible, resistant to cracking. Inside the armor-plated egg — the penal colony of the Big Lie — the prisoners were condemned to compulsory happiness.

I did not puncture that filmy membrane. Like so many others, I had my private compensations. I ignored, as well as I could, the shell under which I went about my business. My main concern was to ignore the public sphere, remain simply the “engineer” who was paid for his work, and nothing more. The day was young, like myself, the city vivid and alive, a sanctuary of eternal summer, like my Juliet.

Juliet had just managed to avoid being expelled from the university. A fellow student had sent a “memorandum” to the dean, alluding to the dubious morality of the dark-haired maid of Verona. She had been asked to appear at the same office where, about eight years earlier, I had been summoned by the future Foreign Minister. The rector of the university had been fired only days before and this seemed a favorable moment for the “unmasking” of his niece’s immoral behavior. However, a few days later, it turned out that the rector had not, in fact, been demoted, but promoted. Overnight, Juliet’s uncle had become a vice minister, and the whole episode collapsed.

There I was, once more, sitting on the terrace of the Boulevard restaurant, in the center of Ploiesti, opposite my building site. I was celebrating the sixties, the time when Western Europe was staging its great youth rebellions, while Eastern Europe was learning to adapt itself, more stringently, to the ambiguity being served up in uncertain and calculated portions. The street below was vibrant with passing humanity. All I had to do, it seemed, to pull up a plump catch, was drop my fishing line. I was waiting for the revelation that reality was real, and that I was real, and that I was meant to discover its meaning, its secret, its justification. At any moment, the gods were about to grant me some encrypted privilege, as I moved on from one stage of my life to another.